8 Key Insights for Social Media Marketers from The State of Inbound 2016 Report
Aggregated information can be so helpful to get a sense of what fellow professionals in the industry are doing and thinking about. The explanations of the data help us understand the information even better.
One of my favorite reports is HubSpot’s The State of Inbound 2016 report.
This year’s report is their 8th annual edition, which is also the biggest and most data-packed one. They surveyed 4,500 marketers and salespeople around the world to find out the state and future of inbound marketing.
While the report contains lots of insightful information about inbound marketing, I’d love to focus on and share my take on some of the social media related findings. If you have read the report, I’d love to hear your take on the findings too.
1. Majority of businesses across various industries use inbound marketing
Ever wondered if inbound marketing would work for your business? The answer is likely yes!
More businesses across various industries such as education, financial services, healthcare and medical, industrial and manufacturing, nonprofit, and governmental organizations are primarily conducting inbound marketing than outbound marketing.
I like to think that the foundation of inbound marketing is providing relevant, helpful content to customers at the right time and place. Social media marketers play a key role in the process — creating and distributing such content.
2. Marketers who calculate ROI are 1.6x more likely to receive higher budgets
From our recent State of Social Media 2016 report, we found that tracking ROI and measurement is one of the top challenges faced by social media marketers today.
Measuring the success of social media isn’t easy but the upsides are worth the effort. Marketers who calculate ROI are much more likely to receive higher budgets.
With social media platforms becoming pay-to-play channels, having more budget means being more able to use ads to boost your performance. It can also mean being able to get better tools to make you more efficient at your work.
To help you get started, here’s a big list of sixty-one social media metrics for you to think about:
3. Marketers who calculate ROI are 1.9x more likely to be confident with their marketing strategy
Here’s another benefit of measuring ROI: confidence in your marketing strategy.
HubSpot found that marketers who calculate ROI tend to be more confident with their marketing strategy than those who don’t.
That makes sense! If you know how you are performing, you can tweak and improve your strategy accordingly.
A great way is to set goals for your social media efforts and measure your performance against those goals:
4. Video marketing is getting a lot of attention
Similar to our State of Social Media 2016 report, video platforms came up as the top content distribution channels for marketers — YouTube, Facebook video, and Instagram.
Despite the interest in video marketing, we found that marketers are held back by several factors — mainly lack of time and perceived costs of creating videos.
My hunch is the benefits of videos aren’t very clear to all marketers yet so it might feel risky to devote resources into creating them. This presents a great opportunity for you to stay ahead of the crowd.
If you are keen to tap into the opportunity, here’s a video marketing guide to get you started:
5. Most marketers are taking 1–3 hours to write a 500-word blog post
From our State of Social Media 2016 report, we found that only 15% of the respondents solely focus on social media management as their full-time role. 83% of the remaining respondents do content marketing as well.
While there are many factors that could influence how long it takes to write a blog post, this could serve as a good benchmark. HubSpot’s State of Inbound 2016 report found that most marketers are taking one to three hours to write a 500-word blog post.
As a relatively new content writer, I fall under the “Over 4 hours” category at the moment. I have been spending more than ten hours on blog posts with about 2000 words.
That said, I believe constant practice makes us better. For instance, Belle Beth Cooper was able to reduce her writing time from 2 days to 4 hours:
6. Opportunities for growth is the top consideration for marketers in their job
What do you consider the most in a job? What do you look for in a career?
Opportunities for growth is the top factor marketers consider, with 61% of the respondents choosing it.
This is followed by work/life balance (49%) and then compensation (46%). It’s encouraging to see that more marketers prioritize their growth and work/life balance over compensation.
This survey question also provides a good list of factors to consider when you are looking for a new job. Some of the other top considerations for marketers are culture, company performance, location, and team.
7. 38% of marketers prefer to use social media for business communications
For business communications, it’s not surprising that email, face-to-face, and phone emerged as the top three methods of communication.
What’s interesting is that a good portion of marketers prefers to use social media (38%) and messaging apps like WhatsApp (24%) to communicate. This might indicate a shift in communication methods among marketers.
If you want to connect with fellow marketers for collaborations or knowledge exchange, perhaps also consider using channels such as social media and messaging apps.
8. Most marketers are using LinkedIn for professional purposes and Facebook for personal purposes.
So which social media channel do you use to connect with fellow marketers?
It depends on whether you want to connect for professional or personal purposes.
For professional networking, most marketers (80%) still prefers LinkedIn. That is followed by Facebook (73%) and then Twitter (64%).
For social networking, Facebook is still most preferred with 92% of respondents choosing it. Twitter (60%) and Instagram (59%) are the next two top choices of marketers for personal purposes.
Since personal preferences will vary between individuals, it’s probably great to start with the traditional preferences when wanting to connect with another marketer. That is LinkedIn for professional purposes and Facebook for personal purposes.
Over to you
And that’s my 8 key takeaways from HubSpot’s State of Inbound 2016 report for social media marketers and my take on them. If you are interested in reading the full report, it can be found here:
Did any of these findings spark any thoughts for you? It’ll be great to hear from you!
